by Selena Scott
Jackson bounded after Race and into the clearing. His eyes took in the glint off the firearm in his hands, the crazed look in the hunter’s eye as he limped on his bloody leg toward the shifters.
Jackson could see the tranquilizer darts sticking out of many of the fallen animals, smell the drugs on the air, but he knew that the gun in Race’s hand was meant to kill. The man had gone off the deep end.
There was a black bear in front of Race, woozy from the sedatives but awake. He roared at Race and tried to charge. Race lifted his gun and fired. The bear stuttered in his steps and fell to the ground.
“Drop your weapon!” Ben shouted from the porch, his own firearm drawn. “Drop your weapon or I will fire on you!”
Race looked undecided and his shotgun sagged down as if he couldn’t decide between dropping it or finishing off the bear that lay dying on the ground in front of him.
“No!” Kaya screamed, lunging forward out of the dark night, throwing her body in between Race and the bear, tears streaming down her face.
But Jackson saw what was happening in slow motion. He wasn’t scared, he was nothing. He knew, without a doubt, that the world would not be so cruel as to take Kaya from him. He knew that he would be able to make it to her in time.
And sure enough, just as Race’s shotgun rose up, just as Ben’s shot from the porch cracked out into the night, Jackson was a pure-white jet across the lawn. He registered Kaya’s scent and body against one side of him just as he also registered a blunt hot spew impact against his other side.
He couldn’t help but fall on her.
“NO!” Kaya screamed again, pushing to her feet and standing over Jackson. Jackson saw that Race was on the ground now, but he was lifting his gun again, pointing it at Jackson’s head.
But then Kaya was discharging the mace that Jackson had bought for her, directly into Race’s face.
The man screamed and coughed, spittle and vomit coming up onto the lawn.
“Call 911!”
“Get the shifters back inside!”
There was more shouting and then there was pressure on Jackson’s side. He felt dizzy with pain and adrenaline. He tried to stand and couldn’t.
“No, no. Just lay still, baby.” That was Kaya against him, her tropical eyes so big in her face.
Jackson’s vision went black for a moment and when he opened his eyes, he saw that he was lifting a hand to her face. He had shifted without realizing it.
“You attacked him,” he said to Kaya.
There were blurry tears in her eyes. “He shot you, Jackson. Of course I attacked him. You’re my mate.”
He felt delirious; dimly, he was aware that Ben and his mother were pressing towels against his midsection while Raphael and Seth were dragging a yowling Race away from the scene. He could only assume that Natalie and Sarah were attending to as many shifters as they could.
“I am?” he asked her, feeling lost and wincing with pain as the pressure on his midsection increased.
“Of course you are. Don’t go changing your mind on me.”
Sirens blared in the distance.
“Will you feel that way tomorrow?” he asked her.
“I’m going to feel that way for the rest of my life.”
Jackson let those words drift him away. He blinked his eyes closed and let the darkness come.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jackson woke up in a hospital bed. His eyes didn’t seem to want to come open and for a minute, he didn’t think they were going to. That was fine. But then, when he tried to shift, he realized that one of his hands was stuck to the side of his bed.
Handcuffed, he realized with ice in his gut. He’d known, as he’d flashed in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance, that he’d been outed as a shifter. He’d also known that he was headed straight to a hospital chock full of mandatory reporters. The odds of walking out of that hospital as a free man were slim to none.
He tested the bonds of his handcuffs and they tightened around his wrist, feathering gently over his skin.
Wait a second, handcuffs didn’t do that.
He forced his eyes open only to be greeted by a pair of tropical blue eyes that had been staring right at him as he slept.
He grunted in surprise and looked down at the hand of his that she held as tightly as a pair of handcuffs.
“I’m not handcuffed,” he said in confusion.
“No,” she agreed. “Ben made them take them off.”
“They’re not arresting me?”
“No.”
“But… why?”
Kaya’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, it’s a mess, Jackson, but you’ll never believe what’s going on.”
“What?”
“Do you hear that? Outside?”
He strained his ears and sure enough, in the distance, there was the sound of people chanting something. Lots of people. “What is it?”
“People have come from all across the country to make sure that you and your brothers don’t get interned at a camp.”
“What?”
“You’ve been out for three days, baby. You hit your head on the way down after you got shot. But it’s been a busy three days.”
His head spun. He couldn’t, in his concussed state, possibly conceive of a world that could have changed so much in three days.
“Explain.” It was the best he could do.
And so she did. She told him about the news reporters who’d interviewed her over and over again. How she’d explained how in love they were. How he’d jumped in front of a shotgun for her. She’d explained everything she knew to be true about the shifters in her life. That they were kind and loving and scared of being forced out of the lives they’d worked so hard to live.
“They believed you?” He couldn’t believe that the media, so shifter-hating, wouldn’t have altered the story to whatever bullshit Race was claiming to be true.
“Race corroborated the story.”
“What?” He winced as his emphatic question tightened the muscles in his midsection and a screaming wave of pain overtook him.
And so Kaya explained the rest. That Race came clean only after the moment that Shelly had shifted back into her human form and he’d realized that she was the beloved Michelle he’d thought he’d lost so many years ago. Apparently Michelle’s mother had taken Michelle from Race when she’d realized she’d passed the lynx shifter gene to her daughter. Things had been bad in their marriage and Race had never been able to make her believe that he wouldn’t turn them in someday. She’d fled instead, taking her daughter with her and leaving Race a twisted shell of himself with a hell of a vendetta against shifters of all kinds.
“When he realized that his daughter was still alive and right in front of him, he swore he’d do anything to get her back in his life.”
“She asked him to confess. To clear our names.”
“Bingo.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why I’m not arrested and recuperating in some shifter camp somewhere.”
Kaya sighed. “Another shifter camp burned down on the full moon. Forty shifters are presumed dead. There’s an immediate federal investigation into the conditions there at the camp. Ex-employees at the camps have been coming forward with their stories on how deplorable the conditions are. How inhumane they believe the whole thing to be. And now, people are really gravitating toward our love story. It seems like the court of public opinion is being swayed fairly quickly.”
“So. What, I get to walk out of her?”
She winced. “It’s not going to be that simple. But, Jacks, I don’t think you’re going to be interned.”
His mind whirled. He couldn’t help but let it settle in one place. “You said love.”
“Hmm?” she asked, stroking at his hair.
“You said our love story.”
“Right.” Her brow furrowed.
“Because you love me,” he said, searching for confirmation.
She laughed softly and leaned forwar
d to kiss his lips. “Because I’m in love with you, my sweet, ridiculous, overbearing mate.”
He found he couldn’t respond. His head hurt, her hands in his hair were heaven, and everything in the world was just too complicated. Everything but Kaya.
***
Four Years Later
“Happy Jackson Durant day, everybody!” Raphael called to the family as they sat in the sunshine on Elizabeth’s back porch.
The family laughed and toasted with their champagne, but Jackson winced. “Can we not call it that, please?”
“Aw, my brother-in-law is modest,” Nat said, leaning over to pinch his cheek.
“It’s not that. It’s just that a lot of people worked hard for this day and calling it Jackson Durant Day completely minimizes—”
“Baby,” Kaya said, her eyes sparkling as she pressed up on her bare toes to kiss his lips. “Learn to take a compliment.”
He sighed. For her, he’d do anything. Especially when she looked like this. Radiant, sleepy, gorgeous, with her baby bump starting to really pop. He sat down and gently tugged her into his lap, smiling to himself when he felt just how warm the skin on her calves was. It tickled him to no end that pretty much as soon as he’d gotten her pregnant, she’d gone from being the coldest woman in the world to constantly overheating.
“I’m just saying, let’s call a spade a spade,” he said to the group, lifting his glass again. “Happy Shifter Liberation Day, everyone.”
They couldn’t help but toast again.
It was two years since the actual Shifter Liberation Day, and the family continued to celebrate the anniversary. It was the day that had changed their lives forever. The day that the very last shifter camp had been shut down and discrimination, of any kind, against shifters officially became illegal.
Raphael joked and called it Jackson Durant Day simply because Jackson had worked tirelessly, for the two years after he was shot, to see that come to pass.
So many people had been mobilized by that particularly eventful full moon. And more people than he’d ever thought possible had come out of the woodwork to support shifters. Friends, families, lovers—it seemed that over half of America had known and loved a shifter in secret, terrified of losing them to the government.
To the Durants’ palpable surprise, one of the people who’d been changed by the events of that day had been Race himself. He was still serving his time, but his impassioned letters to his daughter that she then read during press conferences had inspired their own kind of cultural change. Race used his regrets and his experiences to talk to other men like him. People who were scared of shifters and were motivated to use violence against them. He encouraged them to consider their motives, to get to know their neighbors, not to live their lives in fear and ignorance.
Jackson wasn’t sure that he’d ever forgive Race for holding a shotgun to his wife, but as Kaya was here, living and breathing in his arms, it didn’t keep him up at night anymore.
His life was so different than it had been four years ago. He’d never, in his wildest dreams, thought that he’d be out to the entire nation about being a shifter. That, with Kaya as his wife, he’d be speaking in front of congress, at colleges around the country, in front of foreign diplomats, about the rights of shifters.
He also hadn’t expected to go back to school. But now that it was no longer illegal to study shifter medicine, he was putting his veterinary degree to work and adding a medical degree to his list of accomplishments. He and Kaya were on track to open the nation’s very first Shifter Health Clinic. Where shifters in either form could come for medical care.
“Daddy? Why is it Jackson Durant day? Is it Uncle Jacks’s birthday?”
“No, dummy. That was last month, remember?”
That was Elias and Melanie, Sarah and Seth’s adopted twin children. Their adoption had only become final a year ago, though they’d lived with Seth and Sarah as foster children for a year before that. The pair was five years old and just starting to grapple with the fact that they were elk shifters in a world that was only marginally friendly to shifters. Things were better than ever before, but the world had a long way to go.
“It’s Jackson Durant day because Uncle Jacks worked really hard for a lot of years to make sure that the world was safe for people like us. For shifters.” Seth kissed Elias’s forehead and smoothed his messy hair down. “And don’t call your brother a dummy.” He smoothed Melanie’s hair down, too.
“Melly! Play!” Ace shouted from where he sat in Bauer’s arms. The two-year-old son of Raphael and Natalie adored his grandfather, but nobody held a candle to Melanie in Ace’s eyes.
Melanie grinned and held her hand out to help Ace down the stairs and into the backyard where toys were slung all over the place. “Come on, Acey.”
“Wait for me!” Elias insisted, bolting after them.
Natalie, sitting in the chair next to Jackson and Kaya, contentedly rubbed her pregnant belly as she watched her son play with his cousins. “Can’t believe there’s about to be three more kids added to the mix.”
She reached out for her sister’s hand and they squeezed. So far, they’d loved being pregnant at the same time.
“Yeah, I know,” Raph said, gazing at the kids. “It’s crazy—hold on. Did you just say three more?” He swung around in his seat to stare at his wife.
Natalie managed to bite her lip and grin at the same time. “Didn’t I mention that I found out this afternoon that we’re having twins?”
Raphael whooped and jumped out of his seat, diving across the porch to soundly kiss his wife.
Jackson and Kaya kissed one another as well, just because they could. And Jackson grinned around at Seth and Elizabeth, tears welling in their eyes, Sarah calling for another toast, Bauer covering his smile unsuccessfully.
He was grateful for the good news for Raphael, not only because now the spotlight was off of him, but because he was excited that the Durant family would be expanding even more. He couldn’t believe how much had changed since they were younger.
This feeling, here, with Kaya in his lap and his baby in her belly, his family laughing and joking and loving one another, this was the opposite of being a lone wolf.
The End
A Mate for Phoenix
Prologue
A wall of heat and light and roaring, searing sound rose up in front of the wolf. He skidded to a quick stop on all fours. Behind him, he could hear the pathetic, heartbreaking bleating of a deer who hadn’t moved as fast as he.
Only a moment ago, the forest fire had been at his heels, ravenously devouring the drought-dry pines on the northern face of the hill. But the wolf had watched enough forest fires from afar to know that they could jump. One little kiss of the wind and they were rolling, unchecked, in a new direction.
Unfortunately in this case, that left very few directions for the wolf to run. He doubled back, heard the last dying cries of the deer, and realized he was going to have to jump through a wall of flame if he was going to get out of this alive. If he survived. It was his only choice.
At the root, where they singed the dirt, the flames were as orange as a blood moon, but they were almost invisible with heat at their fingertips, so hot they burned all the oxygen out of the wolf’s world. He knew that it was an illusion. That jumping high, through the clear part of the flame would be hotter than the jumping through the orange part. He ducked his head, closed his eyes and leaped.
For a moment, he’d thought he’d made it unscathed. Had he jumped fast enough? At just the right moment? And then the unimaginable pain began. He scented burned fur and roasting flesh. This was surely the kind of pain that ferried a creature’s soul to the other side. The kind of pain that left only bones for his siblings to find.
And his siblings were the last thing he thought of, before darkness closed over him. His brother and his sister. God, he hoped they’d smelled the smoke on the air and stayed away. He hoped they were in their cave miles away, still sleeping, his sister warm in her
pile of leaves, sheltered from the wind. His brother’s tail twitching in his sleep. Well, the wolf realized as his eyes cracked open, burned from the smoke and closed again, surely for the last time. Now, there would be nothing to keep his brother and sister from leaving their wolf lives behind, from entering the human world. His aversion to everything human had been the main thing keeping them wild, here in the wilderness.
But soon, he’d be the wildest, most free thing that could ever be imagined. He’d simply be ashes on the wind. Decomposing bones. Only a memory.
And in pain so acute he was no longer breathing, no longer letting his heart strain for the next beat, the wolf welcomed oblivion.
CHAPTER ONE
“Thank you all for coming in on such short notice. As I’m sure you gathered from my email, we’ve had a sudden influx of clients and we need to make a game plan for how to manage them all.”
Ida Greer held back a sigh as she watched her boss, Diana, round the far end of the conference room table and sink gracefully into her seat, arranging files in front of her and squaring her coffee cup at a perfect right angle. Just once Ida would like to be able to make an entrance like that. All smart pantsuit and clicking heels, something authoritative and professional coming out of her mouth. But Ida knew herself well enough, at age twenty-five, to know that that kind of self-contained grace was not in the cards for her.
Look! Diana leaned back in her chair, her long legs crossing demurely, as she pulled a pencil from behind her ear and made a quick note on a file. She even made that simple motion into a power-move. The one time Ida had ever worn a pencil behind her ear, she’d stabbed herself in the head and she still had the little black dot of healed-over pencil lead to prove it.